The vampirisation of the novel: narrative crises in Dracula

Abstract

This article sets out to explore how Dracula narrates the crisis that the novel as a genre faces by the end of the nineteenth century. The fictional female characters play a particular role in such process: whereas the status of women in Bram Stoker’s piece has been widely studied in terms of how their vampiric sexualisation affects their position in society and their relationships with men, there has been little analysis of their condition as writers and their relation to the novel as a genre. In Dracula, Mina Harker is a character who manages to record in her journal the events that unfold in the work of fiction, as well as her analysis of them. Similarly, her fiancé Jonathan Harker, the vampiric Count’s solicitor, documents their adventures in order to keep some sanity in the light of the sexual, psychological and social disorder Dracula triggers. This chaos gains special significance in fin-de-siècle Great Britain, sieged by the decadence of the empire and the conflicts brought about by industrialisation. While Jonathan’s accounts display features of the realist novel, Mina attempts to create a new narrative that entails a particular conception of the woman writer: a bourgeoning member of the middle class whose insights into reality are analytically critical and who incipiently acknowledges her sexual dimension, as suggested by the process of vampirisation she experiences. It is through writing that she becomes different from other highly sexualised vampires in the novel, namely her friend Lucy Westenra and the three women who inhabit the Count’s castle. Mina’s chronicles destabilise the novel as a form by proposing a new language for women and, specifically, for the woman writer. This proposal is one of the greatest threats that Dracula poses to the Victorian period through the use of the gothic. All male main characters in Stoker’s piece put in constant effort to counter such menace. Given these men’s success, Mina’s writing does not thrive and, as the anticipatory note to the novel promises, a “sequence will be made manifest”, which will realistically organise the events unchained by the vampire. In this way, both Mina’s writing and Stoker’s narrative, made up of fragments of different genres that can be nevertheless, appreciated as a whole, undergo an interrupted process of vampirisation.